What political scientists are saying about impeachment behind closed doors
So, somebody made a mistake a few days ago. A political scientist who doesn't study electoral politics decided to ask some experts in electoral politics about polling on impeachment, via email. By accident, this person, who shall go unnamed, included me. Oops. It happens. Thanks to that, and several days worth of everybody's favorite-- reply to all-- I've had a fun, little excursion into the minds of a few other political scientists' thoughts on impeachment, polling, and 2020. These individuals, mind you, are some smart people, whom I shall not name.
I still disagree with the gist of most of what they typed.
Nevertheless, here's what gets said behind your backs! Watch me tattle! (But... without naming names.)
There are actually some big divisions. As a starting point, remember that political scientists are, like most academics, Democrats. They don't like Trump. In fact, even the Republicans in academia don't like Trump, but the reply-all-ers who have been going back and forth for the last few days and clogging up my inbox are Democrats.
How many of them share my approach to the question of impeachment? Within the very small sample of reply-all-ers: none. Remember how I have been approaching the question: Our one observation of a failed impeachment is that it backfired. See: 1998. There is, however, awareness that Trump's poll numbers haven't budged.
Where the discussion got interesting for me was over two matters of what I consider to be somewhat questionable empirics: messaging and mobilization.
Let's start with messaging. Campaign managers and other soft-n-squishy types like to tell themselves that if you just talk about your positions in the right way, you can sway voters. Jacobs & Shapiro have a really good book about how this mentality prevents politicians from taking insincere policy positions: Politicians Don't Pander. So, is there a right way to talk about impeachment, and a wrong way to talk about impeachment? I'm not sure it matters. After all, rhetorical battles work both ways, and at the end of the day, that means elections revert to the fundamentals, like the economy (yeah, that did come up. Political scientists, and all...)
Next, mobilization. If people on each side are hard to sway because everybody is set in their ways, then Trump supporters are mobilized by affection for him and animosity towards Democrats, while Democrats are mobilized by hatred for Trump and the belief that he needs to go, with the critical question being who is more mobilized, and the question for impeachment being who is more mobilized by that. Is that affected by "messaging?"
Um... Uh...
Like messaging, mobilization works both ways. If you mobilize someone, and I, as your opponent, mobilize someone, we cancel each other out. Yes, if one side mobilizes more effectively, that's advantageous, but to use an analogy that my students really liked from Sides & Vavreck's The Gamble (about 2012), that's still going to follow the basic principles of tug-o-war, as will the basic nature of any counterbalancing campaign tactic.
That's why, at the end of the day, I'm a big picture kind of political scientist. From what I can see, not a lot of political scientists are comfortable acknowledging that our one data point for a failed impeachment is 1998. Why not?
Um... they're Democrats, and a) they know the impeachment will fail, but b) they also want Trump to lose in 2020.
Does it follow that the backlash will necessarily occur? By the technical definition of "deduction," not deductively, but it's our clearest empirical case. Right now does not look like immediately before the House voted to impeach Clinton. Trump's approval is lower, and the economy is weaker, and both of those are important to note, but it is also worth noting that the dialog among political scientists, behind the email shroud, doesn't always apply political science models.
Should they? Let's apply some Phil Tetlock here. Tetlock makes reference to the old story of the fox and the hedgehog. The hedgehog knows one big thing, but the fox knows a little about a lot of different things. According to Tetlock's explanations of who makes better predictions, overall, it's the fox method. (By the way, your reference here is Isaiah Berlin, who was also the one who explained the difference between positive and negative liberty. That difference is why "liberal" means "left" in American politics. Those confused about the use of the word, "liberal," in American politics-- and there are many-- really need to read Isaiah Berlin. Sorry. Tangent, but this one bugs me a lot these days.) The foxes here are the ones coming up with ad hoc rules and explanations for why this time it might be different, and how the Democrats should do X, Y and Z, and blah, blah, blah.
I'm bein' a hedgehog here. Of course, fox thinking screwed everything up in 2016, when Alan Abramowitz's "Time For A Change" model got it right, and we got everything wrong by thinking the process was more complex than it really was.
Reminder: AABBAABB...
How many elections do you have to alter for that to be the precise pattern from 1944 through 2016?
One. Make one little change, leave everything else the same, and you have that precise pattern from 1944 through 2016. The answer is 1980. That was an R. If that had been a D rather than an R, the sequence of presidential election results from 1944 through 2016 would have been DDRRDDRR, all the way through.
It is as though you had that perfect sequence, and some cosmic trickster who exists outside of time looked at it, switched 1980, just to mess with us, and walked away, laughing.
Then again, the economy sucked in 1980, so as far as our actual econometric models go, ain't no problem there!
Call my model (or rather, Alan Abramowitz's model) reductivist, or simplistic, but it has a lot of predictive power, with just the two-term variable. Add in GDP? Yeah, I'm good with that. There's a lot of complicated stuff in the world, and fox thinking often makes better predictions. My colleagues are doing it right now.
What's fascinating is that even my quantitative colleagues are being foxes!
Me? I'm going hedgehog on this specific topic of presidential elections. Why?
DDRRDDRR...
After the 2016 election, I made a vow. I would not forsake Alan Abramowitz again. Watch me stick to that vow.
Other political scientists, though? They really want Trump to lose, and they really want to salvage impeachment, even though they know he'll be acquitted in the Senate. Some are more nervous than others, and that's the argument going on.
It's not tattling if I don't name names.
I still disagree with the gist of most of what they typed.
Nevertheless, here's what gets said behind your backs! Watch me tattle! (But... without naming names.)
There are actually some big divisions. As a starting point, remember that political scientists are, like most academics, Democrats. They don't like Trump. In fact, even the Republicans in academia don't like Trump, but the reply-all-ers who have been going back and forth for the last few days and clogging up my inbox are Democrats.
How many of them share my approach to the question of impeachment? Within the very small sample of reply-all-ers: none. Remember how I have been approaching the question: Our one observation of a failed impeachment is that it backfired. See: 1998. There is, however, awareness that Trump's poll numbers haven't budged.
Where the discussion got interesting for me was over two matters of what I consider to be somewhat questionable empirics: messaging and mobilization.
Let's start with messaging. Campaign managers and other soft-n-squishy types like to tell themselves that if you just talk about your positions in the right way, you can sway voters. Jacobs & Shapiro have a really good book about how this mentality prevents politicians from taking insincere policy positions: Politicians Don't Pander. So, is there a right way to talk about impeachment, and a wrong way to talk about impeachment? I'm not sure it matters. After all, rhetorical battles work both ways, and at the end of the day, that means elections revert to the fundamentals, like the economy (yeah, that did come up. Political scientists, and all...)
Next, mobilization. If people on each side are hard to sway because everybody is set in their ways, then Trump supporters are mobilized by affection for him and animosity towards Democrats, while Democrats are mobilized by hatred for Trump and the belief that he needs to go, with the critical question being who is more mobilized, and the question for impeachment being who is more mobilized by that. Is that affected by "messaging?"
Um... Uh...
Like messaging, mobilization works both ways. If you mobilize someone, and I, as your opponent, mobilize someone, we cancel each other out. Yes, if one side mobilizes more effectively, that's advantageous, but to use an analogy that my students really liked from Sides & Vavreck's The Gamble (about 2012), that's still going to follow the basic principles of tug-o-war, as will the basic nature of any counterbalancing campaign tactic.
That's why, at the end of the day, I'm a big picture kind of political scientist. From what I can see, not a lot of political scientists are comfortable acknowledging that our one data point for a failed impeachment is 1998. Why not?
Um... they're Democrats, and a) they know the impeachment will fail, but b) they also want Trump to lose in 2020.
Does it follow that the backlash will necessarily occur? By the technical definition of "deduction," not deductively, but it's our clearest empirical case. Right now does not look like immediately before the House voted to impeach Clinton. Trump's approval is lower, and the economy is weaker, and both of those are important to note, but it is also worth noting that the dialog among political scientists, behind the email shroud, doesn't always apply political science models.
Should they? Let's apply some Phil Tetlock here. Tetlock makes reference to the old story of the fox and the hedgehog. The hedgehog knows one big thing, but the fox knows a little about a lot of different things. According to Tetlock's explanations of who makes better predictions, overall, it's the fox method. (By the way, your reference here is Isaiah Berlin, who was also the one who explained the difference between positive and negative liberty. That difference is why "liberal" means "left" in American politics. Those confused about the use of the word, "liberal," in American politics-- and there are many-- really need to read Isaiah Berlin. Sorry. Tangent, but this one bugs me a lot these days.) The foxes here are the ones coming up with ad hoc rules and explanations for why this time it might be different, and how the Democrats should do X, Y and Z, and blah, blah, blah.
I'm bein' a hedgehog here. Of course, fox thinking screwed everything up in 2016, when Alan Abramowitz's "Time For A Change" model got it right, and we got everything wrong by thinking the process was more complex than it really was.
Reminder: AABBAABB...
How many elections do you have to alter for that to be the precise pattern from 1944 through 2016?
One. Make one little change, leave everything else the same, and you have that precise pattern from 1944 through 2016. The answer is 1980. That was an R. If that had been a D rather than an R, the sequence of presidential election results from 1944 through 2016 would have been DDRRDDRR, all the way through.
It is as though you had that perfect sequence, and some cosmic trickster who exists outside of time looked at it, switched 1980, just to mess with us, and walked away, laughing.
Then again, the economy sucked in 1980, so as far as our actual econometric models go, ain't no problem there!
Call my model (or rather, Alan Abramowitz's model) reductivist, or simplistic, but it has a lot of predictive power, with just the two-term variable. Add in GDP? Yeah, I'm good with that. There's a lot of complicated stuff in the world, and fox thinking often makes better predictions. My colleagues are doing it right now.
What's fascinating is that even my quantitative colleagues are being foxes!
Me? I'm going hedgehog on this specific topic of presidential elections. Why?
DDRRDDRR...
After the 2016 election, I made a vow. I would not forsake Alan Abramowitz again. Watch me stick to that vow.
Other political scientists, though? They really want Trump to lose, and they really want to salvage impeachment, even though they know he'll be acquitted in the Senate. Some are more nervous than others, and that's the argument going on.
It's not tattling if I don't name names.
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